Why is it that I always run out of mod points just before finding a comment that says exactly what I was going to?
The PSP has an advantage when it comes to adding custom content, but other than that, the DS seems a more natural fit for a game like Lemmings.
But, given that the title is (according to the linked story) being developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, I suppose it was destined to be PSP-exclusive from the start.
A quick Google search on Psygnosis, the original developers of Lemmings, shows that they've been owned by Sony for a dozen years in some capacity and more or less carved up and absorbed a half-dozen years ago; presumably, Sony owns exclusive rights to Lemmings and has no intent of ever letting it appear on the DS, though such a game would likely be very interesting.
Actually, now that you mention it, Donkey Kong is worth mentioning as well; it's protagonist was basically Mario before he had a name, and its gameplay was a direct ancestor of Super Mario Brothers.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, while being the progenitor of later Yoshi-only games (...only Yoshi's Story comes to mind, but I may be forgetting something), is still part of the main Mario series in title. It's gameplay is to SMB2us what SMB3 is to SMB; it's like a sequel to the red-headed step-child of the series.
Treasure is an independent development studio that works under game-by-game contracts with various publishers -- they don't have a marketing department, and they only sign the contract to make a game if they honestly think they can do something worthwhile through the game.
That's not to say that everything they do is perfect -- they have a few flops to their name -- but one can say that Treasure's games are always interesting, even in their failures.
They did. "Advance Guardian Heroes" came out last fall for the GBA, but was met with mediocre reviews. It's now pretty cheap; I actually got it a week ago and my experience thus far is that while the game has potential, it's held back by its bad translation and a b0rked save system, both of which magnify the issues it already has with a messed-up learning curve and sub-standard in-game training/tutorials.
Advance Guardian Heroes release last fall was over-shadowed by the similarly-timed North American release of another Treasure GBA brawler, Astro Boy: Omega Factor, which is frankly a far better game (that is to say, it is a very good game, and close enough in overall style and gameplay to act somewhat as a substitute). Knowledge of Astro Boy's various stories in animation and comics over the years may improve your appreciation of the game, but I can tell you from experience that it is not needed to enjoy it; the game stands on its own. (Although, for those who are curious about how the game's story relates to existing material, the game actually includes something of a small, gradually-unlocked encyclopedia on Astro Boy and related works also by the late Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.)
You might be able to bounce a laser off the card onto the page such that you could tell the color of the light reflecting from the page and match that to where the laser was pointing. But a simple flood projector can not do this, as it lights the entire card at once.
It's not a simple flood projector, it's a high-resolution digital projector. The technique demonstrated is able to do this with such a projector; however, as it is clearly stated, the resolution of the reconstructed image is limited by the resolution of the projector.
And if it was as simple as the set up shown you could substitute the sun for the projector and photograph the morning rush hour in Bejing from your balcony in Boston.
No, for several reasons:
1) You don't have control of how the sun is illuminating Beijing -- the resolution is effectively 1x1 'sun or no sun'.
2) The 'see around corners' bit, which is a novel parlour trick but not why 'dual photography' is useful, still depends on the camera being able to capture reflected light. How much light from the sun manages to light Beijing and then somehow end reflect to Boston?
3) The dual photography transformation gives you a view of the scene from the perspective of the projector as if the scene were being illuminated by a projector in place of the camera. How well do you think a projector sitting in Boston can light up Beijing? And how visible would that be from the sun?
In short, it doesn't matter what someone's fancily named theory says, if it doesn't work in the real world its just a hoax.
That's the most ridiculously closed-minded statement I've seen in a while; I really do hope I'm being trolled. So, I guess general relativity and quantum theory are hoaxes, as well?
Fancy names, but *I* don't see time slow down when I drive really fast, and look at airplanes -- if they couldn't accurately determine both their velocity and their positions, traffic control at airports would be a disaster! And don't even get me started about "quantum entanglement"!
Maybe you should make an effort to understand how something works before giving a knee-jerk reaction as too why it couldn't according to your own preconceived understanding.
The video explains it much better than the abstract. The way I understand things (which may be wildly inaccurate, but I think I have the jist) is:
"Helmholtz reciprocity", which is key to the whole effect, basically states that the transformation a light ray experiences along a certain path is constant regardless of which direction the light is travelling along the path -- meaning that the degree to which a given pixel of the projector causes a given pixel of the camera to illuminated is the same as what would be the case if the camera's pixel was doing the illumination, and the project was making measurements.
The ray vectors themselves need not be known; only the transformation mapping projector pixels to camera pixels must be determined. The geometric relationship between camera and project is as much a part of the scene as the objects being studied: while it (naturally) has significant effect on the transformation, it does not need to be known a priori in order to calculate what the transformation is.
The interesting thing they've done here is come up with an algorithm that adaptively determines which projector pixels (or patterns thereof) are idependent to the view of the camera (and thus orthogonal in the transformation), allowing them to avoid replace a time-consuming pixel-by-pixel illumination scan with a faster parallized approach.
The usefulness of this is in the ability to use an array of cameras with a single projector to 'scan' the scene just once to create a model for how the scene would appear to the view of the camera under arbitrary lighting. This is much easier to do than the more straight-forward approach of a single camera and multiple projectors/light sources, as in that case, the light of the projectors interfere with each other and it cannot be done in parallel.
Game sizes aren't the problem, it's hacking the firmware and/or game code to get the PSP to execute and read data off the memory card what it expects to find encrypted on a disc bearing a unique ID.
Exploits have been found -- there's a "Hello World" working -- so it's probably just a matter of time before something is working somewhat along these lines.
That said, I don't expect it to be anytime soon, nor do I expect that when it arrives it will be a stable solution -- all the tricks that have been tried before with new games detecting mod chips and SafeDisc checks on PC games and such will likely happen on the PSP, with game code making various odd hard-to-filter calls to the system to verify that it is running off a UMD disc and that the disc is an appropriate instance of itself.
However, I don't care for Metroid at all. It's nice enough, but it's a pretty boring game
Of course it gets boring: it's a tiny demo of a game that won't be out until August. What's packed in with the DS, the "First Hunt" demo, only has about 10 minutes of gameplay in it.
Reading the other thinks in the comments here (particularly this leading to this) shows that the only thing remotely obscure about the PSP is the form factor. Everything else is the path-of-least resistance; the standard solution was used wherever possible across all aspects of its design.
UMD uses a 660nm laser diode. DVD uses a 660nm laser diode.
UMD is dual-layer. DVD is dual-layer.
UMD uses AES for encryption. AES is the well documented, academically recommended, military-standard algorithm for encryption of data streams -- it is The Right Algorithm(tm) to use.
Now, as this story confirms, UMDs use an iso9660 based filesystem. CDs and DVDs use an iso9660 based filesystem.
The only efforts Sony made to diverge from DVDs were those needed to (a) adapt the disc design to something more suitable for portable gaming, and (b) make the format a proprietary standard over which Sony would have independent legal and technical control.
It's a legal protection as much as it is technical. "Blowing it open" is of limited practical use, unless UMD writers are available; Sony can sue the pants off of anyone who ever tries to make a UMD writer before Sony decides it's time to have them on the market.
The headline says "MMOG", but the blurb reads as if they may only be a few players together within an instance. Similarly, it's unclear whether the game-world is to be a continuous, load-as-needed sprawling environment or if discrete levels would suffice.
These are significant aspects of a game engine's architecture and you are not going to want to have to customize them in; clarifying the requirements here could significantly reduce the number of possible solutions. (Although, given the average slashdotter's reading comprehension and ability to stay-on-topic, it probably wouldn't make much difference in the responses)
... I had as much as I wanted of the game during the free, open, ~6 month long beta of it 1.5 years ago. It was not-bad, passive fun, but it's not something I'd play a monthly fee for.
Only one item on that list -- the distilling game -- is newer than what was in the beta.
Crap. You're right, that is what I was thinking of; I was just viewing it from a different angle and the idea of it being an oxymoron didn't quite occur to me.
I'm Canadian, so trust me when I say that "how do we prevent the American cultural invasion" is a question I've heard many, many times before. Sensationalism may drum up support, but that still doesn't mean it's fully justified.
Google's response to this, in all likelihood, will be more along the lines of "Hey, good for you. I guess we've got our work cut out for us" than "Oh noes those EU commies aren't playing fair!!1!"
Not to mention the vain attempt to seem topical with a comparison to Jose Bove is not only irrelevant, it's down-right nonsensical; saying "a mild-mannered Jose Bove" is like saying "a quiet boom" or "an unbluish cerulean".
This project is about making sure that books from non-english, European cultures are also available on the Internet and ones' choice of electronic libraries is not limited to an American/English-language selection, which is what Google is currently limiting itself to. It's "well, if they're doing it, maybe we should too!", not, "oh god we can't let them beat us to this".
Diversity of culture is indisputably a good thing and all they're trying to do is maintain and encourage that. Any suggestion of "fighting" or "competition" is simply an angle someone dreamed up to make this seem more "sensationally" newsworthy.
It seems almost every other poster has completely missed the point of the study. Did anyone read the article? It seems like every other thread is simply full of "we need teachers-not-computers in the classroom" kneejerk reactions, which has nothing to do with what this study is focusing on.
From the article:
"Technology is changing all our lives, but it may be revolutionizing the way that young people think, learn and experience education," said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. "Common sense suggests that exposure to digital media affects young people in formative ways, reflected in their judgment, their sense of self, how they express their independence and creativity, and in their ability to think systematically. So far, there is little empirical evidence to back this up."
This study isn't about "technology in the classroom"; it's about finding out if and how the technology that's everywhere is affecting kids and the way they learn, with the ultimate goal of using that knowledge to possibly find more effective ways to teach today's kids -- and that is something that is worth much, much more than $3.3 million. No where does it even imply in the tiniest degree that the results of the study will focus at all on the question of the application of technology in classroom; there are many ways that traditional teaching methods could conceivably be tweaked to be more effective for so-called "digital kids", and this is where the real value of a study like this lies.
Because PCMag is staffed entirely by corrupt idiots who are paid not to point out to their similarly idiotic readers that with the tiniest bit of intelligence and due diligence anti-virus/anti-spyware software is completely unnecessary, even in Windows. The story blurb also mentions firewalls, but that's stupid; it doesn't take up any extra CPU time in any real way.
On top of all this, as others have also pointed out, anti-virus/spyware software is often I/O bound, not CPU bound, so adding a new processor core does nothing to solve the problem of I/O saturation making things seem laggy.
Well, at least it's an unsuccessful plug -- the MIME types on his server are screwed up enough to confuse Firefox, so I doubt anyone is going to the trouble of actually reading his site.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that I always run out of mod points just before finding a comment that says exactly what I was going to?
The PSP has an advantage when it comes to adding custom content, but other than that, the DS seems a more natural fit for a game like Lemmings.
But, given that the title is (according to the linked story) being developed and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, I suppose it was destined to be PSP-exclusive from the start.
A quick Google search on Psygnosis, the original developers of Lemmings, shows that they've been owned by Sony for a dozen years in some capacity and more or less carved up and absorbed a half-dozen years ago; presumably, Sony owns exclusive rights to Lemmings and has no intent of ever letting it appear on the DS, though such a game would likely be very interesting.
Actually, now that you mention it, Donkey Kong is worth mentioning as well; it's protagonist was basically Mario before he had a name, and its gameplay was a direct ancestor of Super Mario Brothers.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, while being the progenitor of later Yoshi-only games (...only Yoshi's Story comes to mind, but I may be forgetting something), is still part of the main Mario series in title. It's gameplay is to SMB2us what SMB3 is to SMB; it's like a sequel to the red-headed step-child of the series.
Treasure is an independent development studio that works under game-by-game contracts with various publishers -- they don't have a marketing department, and they only sign the contract to make a game if they honestly think they can do something worthwhile through the game.
That's not to say that everything they do is perfect -- they have a few flops to their name -- but one can say that Treasure's games are always interesting, even in their failures.
They did. "Advance Guardian Heroes" came out last fall for the GBA, but was met with mediocre reviews. It's now pretty cheap; I actually got it a week ago and my experience thus far is that while the game has potential, it's held back by its bad translation and a b0rked save system, both of which magnify the issues it already has with a messed-up learning curve and sub-standard in-game training/tutorials.
Advance Guardian Heroes release last fall was over-shadowed by the similarly-timed North American release of another Treasure GBA brawler, Astro Boy: Omega Factor, which is frankly a far better game (that is to say, it is a very good game, and close enough in overall style and gameplay to act somewhat as a substitute). Knowledge of Astro Boy's various stories in animation and comics over the years may improve your appreciation of the game, but I can tell you from experience that it is not needed to enjoy it; the game stands on its own. (Although, for those who are curious about how the game's story relates to existing material, the game actually includes something of a small, gradually-unlocked encyclopedia on Astro Boy and related works also by the late Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.)
No, for several reasons:
1) You don't have control of how the sun is illuminating Beijing -- the resolution is effectively 1x1 'sun or no sun'.
2) The 'see around corners' bit, which is a novel parlour trick but not why 'dual photography' is useful, still depends on the camera being able to capture reflected light. How much light from the sun manages to light Beijing and then somehow end reflect to Boston?
3) The dual photography transformation gives you a view of the scene from the perspective of the projector as if the scene were being illuminated by a projector in place of the camera. How well do you think a projector sitting in Boston can light up Beijing? And how visible would that be from the sun?
That's the most ridiculously closed-minded statement I've seen in a while; I really do hope I'm being trolled. So, I guess general relativity and quantum theory are hoaxes, as well?
Fancy names, but *I* don't see time slow down when I drive really fast, and look at airplanes -- if they couldn't accurately determine both their velocity and their positions, traffic control at airports would be a disaster! And don't even get me started about "quantum entanglement"!
Maybe you should make an effort to understand how something works before giving a knee-jerk reaction as too why it couldn't according to your own preconceived understanding.
The video explains it much better than the abstract. The way I understand things (which may be wildly inaccurate, but I think I have the jist) is:
"Helmholtz reciprocity", which is key to the whole effect, basically states that the transformation a light ray experiences along a certain path is constant regardless of which direction the light is travelling along the path -- meaning that the degree to which a given pixel of the projector causes a given pixel of the camera to illuminated is the same as what would be the case if the camera's pixel was doing the illumination, and the project was making measurements.
The ray vectors themselves need not be known; only the transformation mapping projector pixels to camera pixels must be determined. The geometric relationship between camera and project is as much a part of the scene as the objects being studied: while it (naturally) has significant effect on the transformation, it does not need to be known a priori in order to calculate what the transformation is.
The interesting thing they've done here is come up with an algorithm that adaptively determines which projector pixels (or patterns thereof) are idependent to the view of the camera (and thus orthogonal in the transformation), allowing them to avoid replace a time-consuming pixel-by-pixel illumination scan with a faster parallized approach.
The usefulness of this is in the ability to use an array of cameras with a single projector to 'scan' the scene just once to create a model for how the scene would appear to the view of the camera under arbitrary lighting. This is much easier to do than the more straight-forward approach of a single camera and multiple projectors/light sources, as in that case, the light of the projectors interfere with each other and it cannot be done in parallel.
Game sizes aren't the problem, it's hacking the firmware and/or game code to get the PSP to execute and read data off the memory card what it expects to find encrypted on a disc bearing a unique ID.
Exploits have been found -- there's a "Hello World" working -- so it's probably just a matter of time before something is working somewhat along these lines.
That said, I don't expect it to be anytime soon, nor do I expect that when it arrives it will be a stable solution -- all the tricks that have been tried before with new games detecting mod chips and SafeDisc checks on PC games and such will likely happen on the PSP, with game code making various odd hard-to-filter calls to the system to verify that it is running off a UMD disc and that the disc is an appropriate instance of itself.
And thus, the warez cycle of life will continue.
However, I don't care for Metroid at all. It's nice enough, but it's a pretty boring game
Of course it gets boring: it's a tiny demo of a game that won't be out until August. What's packed in with the DS, the "First Hunt" demo, only has about 10 minutes of gameplay in it.
Reading the other thinks in the comments here (particularly this leading to this) shows that the only thing remotely obscure about the PSP is the form factor. Everything else is the path-of-least resistance; the standard solution was used wherever possible across all aspects of its design.
UMD uses a 660nm laser diode.
DVD uses a 660nm laser diode.
UMD is dual-layer.
DVD is dual-layer.
UMD uses AES for encryption.
AES is the well documented, academically recommended, military-standard algorithm for encryption of data streams -- it is The Right Algorithm(tm) to use.
Now, as this story confirms, UMDs use an iso9660 based filesystem. CDs and DVDs use an iso9660 based filesystem.
The only efforts Sony made to diverge from DVDs were those needed to (a) adapt the disc design to something more suitable for portable gaming, and (b) make the format a proprietary standard over which Sony would have independent legal and technical control.
It's a legal protection as much as it is technical. "Blowing it open" is of limited practical use, unless UMD writers are available; Sony can sue the pants off of anyone who ever tries to make a UMD writer before Sony decides it's time to have them on the market.
You know the Enter key? It's the one just above the right Shift key (and you clearly know how to use that).
Do you think, maybe, your eyes would bleed less if you used it? I'd say it's worth a shot.
The headline says "MMOG", but the blurb reads as if they may only be a few players together within an instance. Similarly, it's unclear whether the game-world is to be a continuous, load-as-needed sprawling environment or if discrete levels would suffice.
These are significant aspects of a game engine's architecture and you are not going to want to have to customize them in; clarifying the requirements here could significantly reduce the number of possible solutions. (Although, given the average slashdotter's reading comprehension and ability to stay-on-topic, it probably wouldn't make much difference in the responses)
... I had as much as I wanted of the game during the free, open, ~6 month long beta of it 1.5 years ago. It was not-bad, passive fun, but it's not something I'd play a monthly fee for.
Only one item on that list -- the distilling game -- is newer than what was in the beta.
Aha! They fell 0.8% short of their projections: We've really got them on the run now!
Crap. You're right, that is what I was thinking of; I was just viewing it from a different angle and the idea of it being an oxymoron didn't quite occur to me.
I'm Canadian, so trust me when I say that "how do we prevent the American cultural invasion" is a question I've heard many, many times before. Sensationalism may drum up support, but that still doesn't mean it's fully justified.
Google's response to this, in all likelihood, will be more along the lines of "Hey, good for you. I guess we've got our work cut out for us" than "Oh noes those EU commies aren't playing fair!!1!"
Not to mention the vain attempt to seem topical with a comparison to Jose Bove is not only irrelevant, it's down-right nonsensical; saying "a mild-mannered Jose Bove" is like saying "a quiet boom" or "an unbluish cerulean".
This project is about making sure that books from non-english, European cultures are also available on the Internet and ones' choice of electronic libraries is not limited to an American/English-language selection, which is what Google is currently limiting itself to. It's "well, if they're doing it, maybe we should too!", not, "oh god we can't let them beat us to this".
Diversity of culture is indisputably a good thing and all they're trying to do is maintain and encourage that. Any suggestion of "fighting" or "competition" is simply an angle someone dreamed up to make this seem more "sensationally" newsworthy.
Many Indian and Canadian guest workers are sending just that much more money back overseas to their families instead of spending it here.
I must ask, which sea is this that money must travel over when moving from the US to Canada?
So you're saying that Playboy will have a hard time trying to penetrate this market?
This is GameFaqs we're talking about: It's very essence is defined by fanboyism.
"Unless this case can heat water to 212 degrees, I'm not interested."
"That's not a serial port, that's my ass!"
From the article:
This study isn't about "technology in the classroom"; it's about finding out if and how the technology that's everywhere is affecting kids and the way they learn, with the ultimate goal of using that knowledge to possibly find more effective ways to teach today's kids -- and that is something that is worth much, much more than $3.3 million. No where does it even imply in the tiniest degree that the results of the study will focus at all on the question of the application of technology in classroom; there are many ways that traditional teaching methods could conceivably be tweaked to be more effective for so-called "digital kids", and this is where the real value of a study like this lies.
Agreed.
PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason
Because PCMag is staffed entirely by corrupt idiots who are paid not to point out to their similarly idiotic readers that with the tiniest bit of intelligence and due diligence anti-virus/anti-spyware software is completely unnecessary, even in Windows. The story blurb also mentions firewalls, but that's stupid; it doesn't take up any extra CPU time in any real way.
On top of all this, as others have also pointed out, anti-virus/spyware software is often I/O bound, not CPU bound, so adding a new processor core does nothing to solve the problem of I/O saturation making things seem laggy.
Well, at least it's an unsuccessful plug -- the MIME types on his server are screwed up enough to confuse Firefox, so I doubt anyone is going to the trouble of actually reading his site.
I don't mean to troll, but:
Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage.
Perhaps that's because it started out so very, very slow.